Philosophy should seek a clear‑cut framework. It is this that I have
sought. The principle is that sensations guide perceiving in action and, at
the human, cognitive level, give rise to well‑founded facts about the
objects perceived.

What is involved? As I explored perceiving, as a referential act, I connected
it with directed response. I called this the from‑and‑to circuit.
When I see a tree, I find that I am looking at it and using my visual
sensations to disclose it. The visual field is not terminal, as it was regarded
by traditional empiricism, but informative. It is the external object which
we are concerned with in perceiving. The function of the sense‑organs
was not understood by philosophers, I fear. Nature was too ingenious for them.
A tradition got started, ending, in our day, in positivism and phenomenalism.

The path I took was towards a new type of direct realism. I call it a referentially
direct realism. Sensations function in perceiving as informational. There is
a good deal of selective activity here, as the psychologist knows. And human
cognizing is an achievement emerging from this setting. Its foundational postulate
is that the mechanism of sense-perception furthers the transmission of information
in the way of appearing or manifesting. And this is used as evidence. On its
basis we sensuously think the object we are reacting to and develop our thought
conceptually and linguistically into facts about. Common sense takes this natural
road and then science takes over at a new level.

I have come to speak here of the "fallacy" of the unthought‑of
possibility. Perry, Dewey, Montague, Blanshard and Schneider seem to have thought
of me as a sort of maverick. They never saw what I was driving at. What I was
doing was to undercut both presentationalism and representationalism. I was
working towards a new kind of direct realism.

If I am a little hard on various movements of the time, it is because I believe
that much of their ingenuity is misplaced. Young philosophers work hard but
start from traditional premises. As I see it, phenomenologists and existentialists
have no clear epistemology. Neither like empiricism, evolution and naturalism.
I have protested, more than once, at what I called the neo‑colonialism
of recent American philosophy. Peirce, alone, seems to have survived. A recent
book jumps over critical realism altogether and devotes itself to logical positivism.
Now I take logical positivism to have been more of the nature of a crusade of
Viennese scientists who did not like German speculative extravagances. They
seem to have known little about epistemological explorations in the United States.
But, then, as I have indicated, many young American philosophers spoke of a
stalemate here.

Some people have condemned me for being a materialist, even though an emergent
or non‑reductive one. And so I will end with something shocking. As I
point out, Lenin wanted to start from things but found sensations intervening.
Passmore rather taunts him with it. So do other empiricists. But I have shown,
I think, that perceiving does start with things and that sensations function
within it. I think human knowing is a wonderful achievement but that it emerged
out of a biological situation. This book is, in part, an intellectual autobiography;
in part, an oriented critique of various positions of great vogue.

The Development of Dialectical Materialism ..................... 102
The Ups and Downs of Dialectical Materialism ................ 104
Panpsychism as an Alternative ......................................... 110
Lenin and Epistemology ...................................................
116